Viewing profile — jballanc

When I was in graduate school, I was doing a lot of molecular dynamics simulations, but I did not have access to a lot of high-performance hardware. The math department had a 4-nod…

This is almost certainly what it was. Wiki even has a photo of the USS Gerald Ford undergoing blast tests off of Ponce Inlet, and mentions that it registered as a M3.9 quake: https…

I've been working on RVW, my adaptation of the standard transformer model that is capable of online continual learning without catastrophic forgetting. I finally published the firs…

IIRC, there was always a way to filter out certain messages (or that may be an alt.org customization, but it's been a part of my config file for a while now).

For real! Valkyrie is the perfect "just bash things while only half paying attention" class. Great for when I'm playing to unwind (as opposed to playing as a challenge to myself). …

I think Douglas Adams had one of the best quotes regarding observing infinity: "Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity…

It's been a while since I worked at Apple, but back in the day the entire OS X Server team made extensive use of kerberized NFS shares for moving around large files... ...the last …

My first job after finishing my undergrad degree was performing quality analysis on corn starch. As a condition of employment, I had to sign a paper saying anything I invented rela…

It's been more than a few years since I worked at Apple, but they were always unique in the tech space in that their retail division dwarfed headcount. If I recall correctly all of…

No public repo yet, but coming soon. Just filed for a patent on the technique and am preparing a paper. Posted the first figure I have for the paper here: https://dev.to/jballanc/w…

I've been working on an ML model capable of robust continuous learning, resistant to catastrophic forgetting without relying on replay, an external memory system, or unbounded para…

We need benchmarks that can distinguish between continuous learning and long-context extrapolation.

Let's say, hypothetically, that you had a model that did not need to re-train in order to incorporate new information in its weights. What would you do with such a model?

Just what the title says: I'm wondering why we're still, years after ChatGPT, having to wait weeks or months for "the next version" of a model when so much else in the software wor…

Based on what you've already mentioned, there's a good chance you're familiar, but on the off chance you're not: "Funkungfusion" (or, really, anything off the Ninja Tune label) mig…

Eh, I'm not so sure it'll be that big a deal. The whole supply chain is so twisted and tangled all the way up and down. Shuffling out one piece doesn't seem like it will, on its ow…

Fun fact about that cannon: it took so long for the cannon to cool off between shots that the Byzantines were able to patch each hole it caused before the next shot.

Thanks for the pointer! Definitely looks interesting...

A quick bit of background: I have a Ph.D. in Evolutionary Biology and published a peer-reviewed paper on my thesis topic when I was in grad school. Then, I went to work as a softwa…